Latin-1

Jargon Guides

Latin-1 (or more formally, ISO-8859-1) is an 8-bit extension of the 7-bit ASCII character set (and a subset of the Unicode character set). It mainly adds common (mostly accented) characters (like ä, á, å, ç, ß) needed for several western European languages based on the Latin alphabet.

But What Is Latin-1?

Latin-1 is two sets of letters.

First are all the ASCII characters. If your computer was made in an English-speaking country, these are probably the letters you see right on your keyboard. You can type them without resorting to popups or special keyboard layouts.

Here is the second set. The Proofreading Guidelines show different ways of entering them.

Note especially:

The first character in Latin-1 is the non-breaking space. It is not used in proofing, but can be used in post-processing.

-: "Soft" or "invisible" hyphen. Never used in proofing, and rare in post-processing. It is basically the same as the "" character in HTML.
º ª: Masculine and feminine ordinals. Don't use these in proofing unless the Project Comments say to. Normally replaced by ^o and ^a.
¼ ½ ¾: "Vulgar fractions". Don't use these in proofing unless the Project Comments say to. Normally replaced by 1/4, 1/2, 3/4.
×: Multiplication sign. The Project Comments should say whether to use this instead of the letter x.

Letters

Most Western European languages can be written in Latin-1. You've got:

acute accent: á é í ó ú ý Á É Í Ó Ú Ý
grave accent: à è ì ò ù À È Ì Ò Ù
circumflex accent: â ê î ô û Â Ê Î Ô Û
umlaut or dieresis: ä ë ï ö ü Ä Ë Ï Ö Ü
tilde: ã õ ñ Ã Õ Ñ
extra letters: ç Ç æ Æ ø Ø å Å ð Ð þ Þ

More information can be found at Wikipedia.

But What Is Latin-1?

Letters

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